Oh please sir, don’t assume that I’m old, a lady never reveals her age
2 Likes
This is pretty interesting
I don’t know where the crazy talking points come from.
Gas is pushing a strong narrative that they are critical for the renewable transition. I agree with them, but their marketing is a bit… tasteless.
Coal fired generation seems to be resigned to their inevitable demise. Those companies are pushing pretty hard at transitioning away from their legacy coal assets, but don’t have the capital funds to repace the capacity on their own. Government is trying to get these companies to slow down closure instead of trying to get them to keep the plants running.
Maybe the oil industry is funding advocacy groups or think tanks or something. Renewables and EV would kill a lot of crude oil demand. Maybe, I haven’t seen any cases of it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists. Auto manufacturers are doing a bit in this space, trying to water down fuel efficiency standards to keep Australia as a crap car dumping ground.
I suspect the misinformation has snowballed and is largely being driven by politically entrenched uninformed randoms, an information bubble that’s defended by political entrenchement rather than logic.
3 Likes
Generally yes. The misinformation campaigns of yore have created a bubble of true (un)believers who have been left holding the bag while everyone else, including those whose funding was necessary in the beginning, have ideologically moved on and accepted the reality.
The contemporary campaigns have evolved and taken new forms. Take the recent debate around nuclear in Australia. Most informed people know this is merely a distraction, a rhetorical device designed to consign Australia to continued use of coal plants indefinitely. That is, pretend to accept the reality of climate change while proposing solutions which do not affect the core business (or in the case of nuclear, preserve it for a decade or two).
You’re far more familiar with the coal industry than I, but you’ll find Gina is still funding climate denying groups such as the IPA, while on the fossil fuel front, firms like Exxon and BP still give money to Republicans, the Heritage Foundation and other such groups who still declare climate change a hoax.
2 Likes
Sorry bomber1408 just told me that Gina isn’t involved so we don’t need to worry about her 
1 Like
It isn’t really
If you want decent analysis about the energy replacement needs check out the work of Saul Griffiths.
Or you know, stick to YouTube I guess
How is it not interesting that naturally occurring Forrest fires contribute more to annual global omissions than the USA? How do we reach target CO2 omissions if we have natural events that contribute so much?
I was interested. Often we overlook other solutions to problems. Is slowing down the forest fires a way to decrease CO2 output? Could that be a more efficient use of financial resources?
You’ll find that forest (and other natural habitat) destruction to be a key driver of climate change.
Reversing those trends, including preserving and replanting of native forests, would be a significant step in mitigating the crisis.
3 Likes
and while we’re at it put a plug in the volcanoes 
1 Like
Sigh
Because emissions from wildfires are being made worse by anthropogenic climate change. That cat is out of the bag.
Natural emissions would be part of the natural carbon cycle, but we have completely thrown that out of balance.
Reducing emissions to net zero is a goal to reduce human emissions and impacts as best we can. Because the diff between each degree of warming is immense
The senator is being deliberately obtuse and selective with his use of facts
2 Likes
The damage to the ecosystems in Indonesia and elsewhere by forest and land clearances to make way for palm oil plantations, the lungs of the world in the Amazon basin cleared for soya and beef cattle….
Some of the disasters such as flooding are wrongly labelled as natural disasters.
1 Like
Not the boreal Forrest fires, they’ve been decreasing in severity in the past 150 years.
I dunno…if global wildfires generated approximately 2,170 megatonnes of carbon emissions in 2023
And… fuel consumption in the U.S. transportation sector accounted for about…[1,489 million metric tons (MMmt)]
Then…reducing forest fires and transferring to electric vehicles wherever possible are…both good things?
Maybe I’ve missed the point.
Probably.
1 Like
Oh ok that fine then, luckily it’s not a global issue we are dealing with
Maybe you haven’t, but let’s wait for the comeback…
Ok, pretty standard misinformation. Logic falls apart pretty quickly. He only makes a couple of actual points in there, which are both weak.
His first point was that fertilizer is made using gas, inferring that people will starve to death if we stop emitting carbon. In that process natural gas is a source of hydrogen:
CxHx +N2 > NH3 + CO2
But funnily enough, a great source of Hydrogen is Hydrogen, which we can get from electrolysis of water using solar energy.
H20 > H2 + O2
H2 + N2 > NH3
So on that one, I’d suggest a 30 second google rather than listening to batshit crazy US senators.
The next was that forest fires are going to emit more carbon than all the fossil fuel use. That completely ignores the existence of the primary school curriculum that is the carbon cycle. Plant burns, creates CO2, new plant grows in its place, absorbs the CO2 back into the new growth forest. That loop happens on an enormous scale, far far larger than any human industry, but it’s a loop. The driver of climate change isn’t the carbon cycle, it’s the addition of extra carbon into that system and the only source of extra carbon is human industry.
So no, that wasn’t interesting. That was 10 minutes of my time that you were perfectly able to check on your own with a few minutes of google searches, if you’d been in any way curious instead of believing the things that fit neatly into your pre-existing world view.
12 Likes
How is it not a global issue if the targets are met zero globally by 2050?
I think you’ve missed my sarcasm